Hulu Grew Audience by 23% Year on Year

Late last week, comScore Video Metrix released its November 2011 U.S. Online Video Rankings. The data showed that 183 million U.S. Internet users watched online video content that month for an average of 20.5 hours per viewer. The total U.S. Internet audience viewed 40.9 billion videos.

Like the month before, Google Sites, driven primarily by video viewing at YouTube.com, ranked as the top online video content property in November. The picture painted does not change much from month to month.

So, instead of recounting just how big YouTube is (151.6 million unique viewers watched 20.5 billion videos on Google Sites for an average of 7.4 hours online video per viewer), let’s take a closer look at one of the other online video content properties lower down on the list of online video players: Hulu.

comScore Video Metrix reported that Hulu's audience had grown to 31.3 million unique viewers in November, up from up from 29.2 million in October, and 27.1 million in September.

According to Meredith Kendall, Hulu’s communications manager, “We have seen significant growth over the past several months, and on a year-over-year basis…. According to comScore data, we have seen unique audience growth of 23% year-over-year.”

What has contributed to this growth? According to Kendall, it was several things:

Hulu is the only online streaming service to offer in-season content from five out of six of the major broadcast networks (ABC, The CW, FOX, NBC, and Univision).

In the past month, Hulu has announced partnerships with The CW, Carsey Werner, Sony Pictures Television’s Community, and just last week, the launch of Hulu Latino with Univision, Galavision and Telefutura, and 11 new Spanish-language content partners. These content partners collectively will bring thousands of new premium TV shows and movies to users of both the Hulu and Hulu Plus services:

As of December 1st, the premium content available to Hulu Plus subscribers has grown to over 44,760 TV episodes and 2,575 movie titles.

As of December 1st, users of the free, ad-supported Hulu service enjoy over 36,880 TV episodes and 1765 movie titles.

Hulu Plus exceeded 1 million paid subscribers as of summer 2011, and is seeing increased consumption across devices as it is now available on an installed base of more than 120 million internet-connected devices in the U.S. (not including PCs). In the past month, Hulu Plus launched on three new devices: the Barnes and Nobles’ NOOK Tablet, Amazon’s Kindle Fire, and the WD TV Live Streaming Media Player.

Kendall said, “This growth excites and inspires us as we aspire to build a service that users, advertisers and content owners unabashedly love.”

About the author

Greg Jarboe is president of SEO-PR, which provides search engine optimization, public relations, video marketing, and social media marketing services. He's the author of "YouTube and Video Marketing: An Hour a Day," a faculty member at Rutgers University and Market Motive, as well as a frequent speaker at SES conferences.

If you use rich snippets to markup your videos, you may want to double check that Google is still showing them. Reports indicate a huge reduction – with estimates as high as 44 percent – in the number of video snippets from Google's search results.
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